Contribution short abstract:

I discuss how food is a crucial element of Catalan cultural life. A focus on food provides unique insight into the lived realities of Catalan nationalism, and how Catalans experience and express their national identity today.

Contribution long abstract:

In my work I have provided an ethnographic account of the everyday experience of national identity in Catalonia, using an essential, everyday object of consumption: food. As a crucial element of Catalan cultural life, a focus on food provides unique insight into the lived realities of Catalan nationalism, and how Catalans experience and express their national identity today. In the last few decades, researchers in the social sciences have become increasingly interested in both food and nationalism. However, there are few who have truly considered the connections between these two seemingly disparate areas of social life. In my research in the Catalan Autonomous Community, in northeast Spain, I seek to remedy this gap in the literature by considering how food is used in the Catalan nationalist movement. I will demonstrate a number of the ways in which Catalan cuisine has become one of these markers of national identity. Discourses on food shows how it acts as a source of national pride. I will show how different foods and dishes become heavy with meaning as carriers of national history, representatives of national virtues, and perceived examples of the differences between Catalonia and Spain. I would also briefly like to consider how cuisine is linked to other culture areas more commonly associated with nationalist movements such as language, literature, landscape and history. I will suggest that food is a down to earth way of expressing complex nationalist sentiments in an everyday setting.